Network-Assisted Wireless Computing

Multimedia applications for mobile devices are increasing and growing more sophisticated. Many of these applications require computationally intensive processing, such as image processing, source coding, feature extraction and feature matching. If all of this processing were performed on the mobile device, its limited battery supply would quickly deplete. However, if the request must be transmitted through a network and processed at a remote application server large delays may be incurred due to communication latency-especially if the original size of the request message is very large. In this paper, we propose the use of mid-network processing on intermediary nodes in a multistage tandem network. We refer to this as ldquowireless network-Assisted computingrdquo. Allowing for mid-network processing can alleviate some of the processing burden on the mobile device, thereby extending its lifetime. It can also reduce communication latency by reducing the amount of information transmitted along each link. Certainly ldquoleasingrdquo processing power from these nodes comes at a price-in some cases it is beneficial to lease, in others it is not. We examine the core tradeoff between battery usage, latency, and usage of processing power at mid-network nodes. We identify some interesting properties of the optimal processing schedule. Through numerical analysis we study these properties and tradeoffs.